10/28/2009

Are you ready?

Tough day
Today I had a problem with video adapter at my computer.
Computer was shut down correctly, but won't start any more - shows black screen, HDD lamp is blinking.
Once I saw these showings, I've opened computer case, plug out my Gigabyte GeForce, get VGA cable from the desk and plug it to the on-board video adapter. Now it works (though with pretty bad resolution).
Tomorrow I'll buy new video adapter (probably Asus with 9500GT) and situation will be resolved.

Outage of my work computer is less than a hour, and it will be back to the normal performance in less than 1 day.

This is quick because I had recovery plan.

Why I have recovery plan
Approximately 2 years ago I had the same problem, and it took almost 3 days to discover and resolve the problem. It was awful - at first I thought that my soft RAID crushed, then - that motherboard is the reason, and also at the same time UPS died and gave more issues (I suppose, it was coincidence, but very bad coincidence). I've spent 2 days to fix hardware problem and 1 day to restore data and computer configuration because RAID was broken and I rebuilt it (pump data to the backup USB-drive and back).

Hold yourself in readiness

After that I decided to be prepared.
I knew that it is not possible to get 100% reliable hardware, but I wanted to minimize possible outage and reduce possibility of data loss as much as possible.
At new computer I've installed motherboard with integrated video-adapter to be able to quickly check problem with video adapter. Also I've bought new LCD monitor, which have not only DVI, but VGA input too to be able to work with on-board VGA.
I've set another mirrored RAID - if one disk dies, I have another, and I've got 1000W UPS which is more than my 500W power supply.

...it happens
Today it happened, and I managed situation much quicker than 2 years ago. I knew that I was protected with my preparation and now this feeling is confirmed.

Why it is written in Firebird blog?
In our practice we often see very strange reasons of corruptions. People install Firebird at workstations and never bother to make backups. They never check firebird.log and system logs...
To be honest, work computer is only work computer - source code is in SVN, emails copies are at server mailbox and at notebooks, also there are backups.
But database is another story. It runs for business, and business run on it.... And free license of Firebird does not mean that stored data is also free. Or outage of business running on Firebird costs zero.